CAFTA creeps forward. Other folks weigh in.

As the House Ways and Means Committee passes CAFTA, s couple of Democratic Congresspeople weigh in:

Democratic rising star Senator Barack Obama:

Globalization is not someone's political agenda. It is a technological revolution that is fundamentally changing the world's economy, producing winners and losers along the way. The question is not whether we can stop it, but how we respond to it. It's not whether we should protect our workers from competition, but what we can do to fully enable them to compete against workers all over the world.

So far, America has not effectively answered these questions and American workers are suffering as a result. I meet these workers all across Illinois, workers whose jobs moved to Mexico or China and are now competing with their own children for jobs that pay 7 bucks an hour. In town meetings and union halls, I've tried to tell these workers the truth--that these jobs aren't coming back, that globalization is here to stay and that they will have to train more and learn more to get the new jobs of tomorrow.

But when they wonder how they will get this training and this education, when they ask what they will do about their health-care bills and their lower wages and the general sense of financial insecurity that seems to grow with each passing day, I cannot look them in the eyes and tell them that their government is doing a single thing about these problems.

That is why I won't vote for CAFTA.

In the Black Enterprise, Congresswoman Maxine Waters:

According to one CBC member, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), CAFTA is a bad deal for both American workers and entrepreneurs. “These trade agreements simply are allowing the exportation of jobs to third-world countries and cheap markets. For all of the jobs that leave these industries, African Americans get fewer jobs. They are not able to be employed because we're losing our manufacturing base in particular.” Waters says that the North American Free Trade Agreement, passed in 1994, has had a devastating impact on American workers, exporting almost one million manufacturing jobs to Mexico and turning a $2 billion trade surplus with that country into a $45 billion trade deficit.